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One of my first reactions to the sickening shooting in Arizona, and to the charge that it resulted from violent imagery from politicians and media figures: the Rally for Sanity is suddenly not looking so wishy-washy and irrelevant for focusing on the tone of politics.
One of my next …
William M. Daley is reportedly going to become the next White House chief of staff. I know that because I just read the report in the New York Times, and have seen “BREAKING” announcements from various outlets on Twitter, and have seen numerous reports to that effect for the last few days.
Now some news organization has bragging rights …
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“Crying: Acceptable at funerals and the Grand Canyon.” —Ron Swanson, from a coming episode of Parks and Recreation
Memo to pundits, comedians and political reporters who are not quite comedians: Yes, John Boehner cries. A lot. We get it. It made news when the new Speaker of the …
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9/11 was a tragedy that happened to the entire nation, and in its larger ramifications, to the world. But New Yorkers also felt it, and still feel it, on a personal level: not just the fear, the terrible sights and the awful memories (the rest of America watched 9/11; we smelled …
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Remember when the Park51 Islamic center, or “Ground Zero mosque,” was the absolutely most urgent political-religious-cultural issue facing the United States? When there were protests and fury and old 9/11 wounds reopened, and you needed to choose a side, and politicians from New York …
Last week, we learned via WikiLeaks that the U.S. State Deparment had produced a cable analyzing trends of anti-Americanism in Canadian TV. But it now appears that the U.S. has an offensive as well as defensive posture on televisual warfare—and not just in Canada, which we’ve been bombing into submission with our sitcoms and dramas …
“Don’t retreat. Just reload.” —Sarah Palin, to daughter Bristol, while shooting clay pigeons on Sarah Palin’s Alaska
Tonight, the last and perhaps most closely followed vote of the 2010 midterm season gets under way: the season finale of Dancing with the Stars. This year’s voting has been especially controversial because, week after …
*rolls eyes*
Fresh off having given Keith Olbermann a two-day suspension without pay for donating to three Democratic candidates, MSNBC has done the same to Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough for making eight contributions to candidates (including his brother) in local Florida races between 2004 and 2008.
I wrote about this issue when …
Conservative journalist and sometime TV pundit Tucker Carlson is not Keith Olbermann; he just plays him on the Internet. This past summer, Carlson’s website, The Daily Caller, purchased the URL keitholbermann.com and used the domain to host (generally unfavorable) Daily Caller articles about the liberal MSNBC host. Last week, after Keith …
In the grand tradition of button-pushing pseudoscience, someone has done a study determining which TV programs are most popular among Republicans and Democrats. See here for the list, but the overall skew of the study seems to be that the shows with the higher proportion of GOP fans are high-rated mass hits; those with proportionally …
This just in: MSNBC host Keith Olbermann supports Democrats. According to a report in Politico this morning, Olbermann made the maximum legal donations to three Democratic candidates last month, one of them immediately after he appeared on Olbermann’s show.
This is potentially a problem for Olbermann, because it looks as though he …
* Let me make clear that, for all I know, Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi/time-travel/dinosaur show Terra Nova for Fox may be the greatest thing ever created for television, if it comes to exist. But it continues to make the kind of news you don’t want an upcoming show to make. First it was announced before a single frame was shot, raising the …
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Video: MSNBC wasted little time reacting to the reaction at the polls last night.
“Wave,” “tidal wave,” “tsunami”—the terms for the midterm results in last night’s TV coverage were limited only by the English language’s number of terms for something really big from an ocean. (The …